RESOURCES

Asians beware

"FOR the past two years, nine-year-old Harvey Jiang has been privately tutored in maths and reading after school. This allows his parents, who left their village in China two decades ago, to work long hours in their restaurant. But this is not Beijing; this is Brooklyn, where Harvey is swotting early for a controversial exam."

Only Ten Black Students Were Offered a Spot at Stuyvesant High School This Year, But Is This Really a Problem?

"Forget the subtle changes in the weather at this time of year, there’s really only one guaranteed way to know that spring is finally here: Reports are released about the students accepted at New York’s elite, test-based high schools, and it’s revealed that, once again, only a small percentage of the city’s black and Latino students will be attending. The New York City public school system has 405 public high schools, but like much else in this city, taken as a whole, these schools are indicative of the type of inequality that runs rampant here."

Real Answers to Improve Diversity at the Specialized High Schools

"Critics of the Specialized High School Admissions Test as the sole criteria for admission to Brooklyn Tech, Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and five other schools continue to lament the low admissions rates of African-American and Latino students. While they do so, two remarkable developments occurred last week when the latest admission results were announced."

Res. 442 ignores real problems

How to Solve the Diversity Problem at NYC’s Elite Public Schools. Hint: Their test-only admissions policy isn’t the real issue.

"March is a nerve-racking time for New York City’s public-school eighth graders. These 80,000 or so youngsters will soon receive high-school acceptance letters, and for many this time marks the culmination of months—sometimes years—spent hitting the books, meeting with tutors, and sprucing up resumes. That’s because admission into one of the city’s 400 or so public high schools is rarely automatic: Each kid ranks and applies to as many as 12 schools, and recent statistics suggest that less than half of a year’s applicants get into their first-choices, while 10 percent of them—nearly 8,000 kids—don’t get a match at all."

Report: Don't rush to ax test for NYC specialized schools

"New York City's elite specialized high schools have long been praised as bastions of excellence while facing criticism for their lack of diversity. Critics have focused on the aptitude test that is the sole criterion used to admit students to those schools, but a report released Thursday by researchers at New York University suggests that broadening the admission criteria to include measures such as classroom grades might increase the number of white students at the schools while leaving the proportion of black students unchanged."

New report challenges de Blasio’s strategy for upping diversity in specialized HSs

"Replacing the city’s Specialized High School Admissions Test wouldn’t significantly increase the diversity of the eight sought-after schools that use it, and could exclude even more black students, according to a new report."

NYC Advocate Fights to Save Prestigious High School Exam

"David Lee, 55, is a business investor. He is also one of the co-founders of CoalitionEdu, a group formed this March that hopes to preserve the prestige of an exam that serves as a ladder for immigrants to better education."

Coalition: Keep SHSAT Sole Criterion For Admissions

"A newly-formed Coalition of the Specialized High School Alumni Organizations released a statement on August 25 of Core Principles in support of maintaining the Specialized High Schools Admission Test (SHSAT) as the sole criterion for admission, while calling for an expansion of enrichment and accelerated educational programming in middle schools to identify and prepare more children for the rigors of both the test and the schools’ demanding education."

"A group of alumni of eight prestigious public high schools in New York City issued a statement on Tuesday in support of keeping a test as the sole criterion for entry, inserting themselves in a long-running debate over the admissions process and its impact on the schools’ racial makeup."

Keep the specialized high schools special

"Let’s be clear: there is something wrong when only 13 percent of the students in New York City’s specialized high schools are Latino or African American. However, I do not believe that the problem lies with the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), which eight specialized high schools use as their only criteria for admission. The underrepresentation of some minority groups in these schools is indicative of a larger set of challenges facing this city’s educational system that begin in kindergarten or before. Those who advocate for a more complex admission process do a disservice to the students they want to help, and to the premise of objectivity upon which these specialized schools were founded."

To make elite schools ‘fair,’ city will punish poor Asians

"In 2004, 7-year-old Ting Shi arrived in New York from China, speaking almost no English. For two years, he shared a bedroom in a Chinatown apartment with his grandparents — a cook and a factory worker — and a young cousin, while his parents put in 12-hour days at a small laundromat they had purchased on the Upper East Side."